“I’d put him in that bog first,” Cal says, before he can stop himself.
Mart bursts out laughing. It’s a big, free, happy sound that spreads out, almost shockingly, across the hillside. “I believe you,” he says. “You’d be straight back up there with that spade, on the double. Jaysus, man, it’s a mad world we live in, hah? You’d never know where it’d take you.”
“No shit,” Cal says. “Anyway, I thought you thought the kid was gay.”
“Well, will you look at that,” Mart says, grinning. “We’re back on conversational terms. I’m only delighted. And the child can marry a waster whether she’s gay or not, can’t she? That’s what we voted for: the gays can make fools of themselves, same as the rest of us, and no one can stop them.”
Cal says, “That kid’s no fool.”
“We all are, when we’re young. The Indians do have it right: it’s the parents that oughta arrange the marriages. They’d make a better job of it than a buncha young people that’s only thinking with their wild bits.”
“And you’d have been married off to some skinny girl who’d want a poodle and a chandelier,” Cal points out.
“I would not,” Mart says with an air of victory. “My daddy and mammy never agreed on anything in their lives; there’s no chance they’d have agreed on a woman for me. I’d be where I am now, free and single, and without the consequences of Sheila Reddy’s foolishness to deal with.”
“You’d just find something else to get mixed up in,” Cal says. “You’d get bored.”
“I might, all right,” Mart acknowledges. “How about yourself?” He squints at Cal, evaluating. “I’d say your mammy would have found you a nice cheerful young one with a good steady job. A nurse, maybe, or a teacher; no eejit for you. We’re not looking at any Elle Macpherson—she wouldn’t want you having the hassle of that—but pretty enough. A girl that was up for a few laughs, but no nonsense about her; no wild streak. And your daddy wouldn’t have given a shite one way or another. Am I right or am I right?”
Cal can’t help a half smile. “Pretty much,” he says.
“And you might be better off. You wouldn’t be halfway up a mountain with a banjaxed knee, anyway.”
“Who knows,” Cal says. “Like you say, it’s a mad world.” He realizes that Mart is leaning hard on his crook. His steps are jerkier and more lopsided than they were on the way up, or even at the start of the way down, and the lines of his face have tightened up with pain. His joints have paid for the journey.
The path gradually levels off. The heather and moor grass give way to tangles of weeds pushing in from the verges. Birds begin to chirp and rattle.
“There you go,” Mart says, stopping where the path leads between hedges into a paved road. “D’you know where you are?”
“Not a clue,” Cal says.
Mart laughs. “Head down that way about half a mile,” he says, pointing with his crook, “and you’ll come to the boreen that goes round the back of Francie Gannon’s land. Don’t worry if you see Francie; he won’t go telling tales on you this time. Just blow him a kiss and he’ll be happy.”
“You’re not heading home?”
“Ah, God, no. I’m off to Seán Óg’s for a pint or two or three. I’ve earned it.”
Cal nods. He could use a drink himself, but neither of them has any desire for the other’s company right now. “You did the right thing, taking me up there,” he says.
“We’ll find out, sure,” Mart says. “Give Lena an extra squeeze for me.” He lifts his crook in a salute and hobbles off, with the low winter sunlight laying his shadow a long way down the road behind him.
The house is cold. In spite of all his layers and all the exercise, Cal is chilled to the marrow; the mountain has burrowed deep inside him. He showers till his hot water runs out, but he can still feel the cold spreading outwards from his bones, and it seems to him that he’s still soaked inside and out with the rich smell of peat tainted with death.
That evening he stays indoors and leaves the lights off. He doesn’t want Trey to come calling. His mind hasn’t come all the way back inside his body yet; he doesn’t want her to see him until today has had time to wear off him a little. He puts everything he was wearing in the washing machine and sits in his armchair, looking out the window as the fields dim towards a frosty blue twilight and the mountains lose their detail to become one dark sweep at rest. He thinks about Brendan and Trey somewhere within that unchanging outline, Brendan with the bog slowly working its will on him, Trey with the sweet air healing her wounds. He thinks about how things will grow where his own blood soaked into the soil outside, and about his hands in the earth today, what he harvested and what he sowed.
Trey comes the next day. Cal is doing his ironing on the table when she knocks. Just from that tight tap, he can feel what it’s taken for her to stay away this long. Mostly she thumps that door like the whole point is to enjoy the noise.
“Come in,” he calls, unplugging the iron.
Trey closes the door carefully behind her and holds out a loaf of fruitcake. She looks a whole lot better. There’s still a big scab running down from her lip, but the black eye has cleared to a faint yellowish shadow, and she’s not moving like the rib catches her. She looks like she might have grown another half inch.
“Thanks,” Cal says. “How’re you doing?”
“Grand. Your nose looks better.”
“Getting there.” Cal puts the cake on the counter and takes the watch from a drawer. “I got you what you need.”
He holds the watch out to Trey. It’s clean; he put it in boiling water for a while and then left it to dry out on the heater overnight. He knows that probably fucked it up beyond repair, even if the bog hadn’t managed that already, but it needed doing.
Trey turns the watch over and looks at the inscription on the back. There are little marks on her hands, pink and shiny, where the scabs have fallen away.
“That’s your brother’s watch,” Cal says. “Right?”
Trey nods. She’s breathing like it takes an effort. Her skinny chest rises and falls.
Cal waits, in case there’s something she wants to say or ask, but she just stands there, looking at the watch. “I cleaned it,” he says. “It’s not working, but I’ll find a good watch-repair store somewhere and see if they can get it running for you. If you want to wear it, though, you gotta make sure to tell people Brendan left it behind.”
Trey nods. Cal isn’t sure how much of that she heard.
“You can tell your mama the real story,” he says. No matter what Sheila’s done, she deserves that much. “No one else.”
She nods again. She rubs the back of the watch with her thumb, like if she rubs hard enough the inscription might have mercy and disappear.
“Whoever gave you this,” she says. “They could still have been bullshitting you. About what happened.”
“I saw his body, kid,” Cal says gently. “The injuries were consistent with the statement I was given.”
He hears the hiss of Trey catching a breath. “You sound like a Guard,” she says.
“I know.”
“Is that where you got this? Off his body?”
“Yeah,” Cal says. He has no idea what he ought to do if she asks about the body.
She doesn’t. Instead she says, “Where is he?”
“He’s buried up in the mountains,” Cal says. “I couldn’t find the place again if I tried all year. But it’s a good place. Peaceful. I never saw a graveyard that was more peaceful.”
Trey stands there looking down at the watch in her hands. Then she turns around and walks out the door.
Cal watches her through the windows as she goes around behind the house and down the garden. She climbs over the gate into his back field and keeps walking. He watches till he sees her sit down at the edge of his woods, with her back against a tree. Her parka blends in with the underbrush; the only way he can pick her out is by the red flash of her hoodie.